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Are you going to hit your target number this quarter?
Which deals are closing this week?
What’s your best and worst-case scenario?
If you find these kinds of questions dominating your sales pipeline reviews, your approach may need a rethink. While these questions are important, they often end up minimizing the potential of a sales pipeline review.
Focusing on immediate results, closing deals, or activity metrics can give you and your sales team a false sense of progress. The real goal of a sales pipeline review is to help you as a sales manager understand what’s holding deals back, jump in to address high-potential opportunities and orchestrate the downstream activities for each sales rep.
In this article, we look at the approach a modern sales leader needs to conduct effective pipeline reviews, misconceptions to be mindful of, common traps to avoid, best practices to incorporate, the right questions to ask, and more. Here’s what we’ll cover in detail:
- What a sales pipeline review is – and what it’s NOT
- Benefits of sales pipeline reviews
- Common challenges sales managers face in pipeline reviews
- Why a pipeline review is not the same as an opportunity review
- Foundational elements of a sales pipeline review
- Key questions to ask in n effective pipeline review
- Mistakes to avoid in sales pipeline reviews
- What a sales manager can do to make pipeline reviews more effective
Let’s get right to it.
What is a Sales Pipeline Review?
One of the most common misconceptions is that the primary goal of a sales pipeline review is to gather data for reporting. Data collection is only a part of the process – its purpose is to identify existing and potential roadblocks, understand where deals stand, and provide downstream support to empower your team.
A well-executed pipeline review gives you as a sales manager the insights you need to improve sales strategies, have better one-on-ones with sales reps, and provide context-driven sales coaching to the team.
Benefits of Sales Pipeline Reviews for Sales Managers
Besides the obvious advantage of a comprehensive overview of how your team is doing, sales pipeline reviews give you the ability to spot trends and patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Other benefits include:
1. Healthier Pipelines for Each Sales Rep
By discussing and analyzing each rep’s pipeline across stages, you set up your sales reps to have healthy and balanced pipelines with sufficient deals at each stage. This ensures they take an end-to-end approach to the sales journey – without disproportionately focusing their energies on particular stages.
2. Improved Sales Rep Productivity
By identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies, you can help your sales team improve its productivity. The key is to use insights from across pipeline reviews to remove process blockers, give them timely inputs so they can identify where to focus their efforts, and help them prioritize the right deals at the right time.
3. Inputs for One-on-One Meetings and Sales Coaching
Pipeline reviews give you data-backed insights that you can use for one-on-one meetings and coaching sessions. For instance, a sales pipeline review can give you visibility into deal stages that a particular sales rep struggles with, so you can design targeted and timely interventions to help them get back on track.
4. Improved Forecasting
Lastly, pipeline reviews help you and your sales team get better at forecasting. A pipeline review can be a periodic forcing function that pushes you and your team to take a forward-looking approach to your revenue operations. By periodically understanding where deals stand, you can make informed predictions about future revenue, resources, and hiring needs.
Common Challenges in Conducting Sales Pipeline Reviews
Given that nearly 60% of sales reps believe their pipeline management is ineffective – despite 72% of sales managers conducting multiple sales pipeline reviews every month – is a sign of things falling short.
This is mostly due to challenges that sales managers face when it comes to making the most of pipeline reviews, such as:
1. Data Issues or Outsized Data Collection Effort
A big challenge in pipeline reviews is the reliance on incomplete or outdated data. Plus, when you rely only on sales representatives to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to gathering data, pipeline reviews become another chore or just another admin task that slows them down.
In an ideal scenario, sales leaders, managers, and reps come to these review meetings with a point of view based on a review of the most up-to-date deal data and preparing questions on key details in advance.
The best way to approach this is to outsource data collection to technology, say by using the right CRM capability or sales pipeline review template to gather data. As a sales manager, you need to have access to real-time data – on deal stages, deal health, and blockers, so you can assess the true health of the pipeline.
2. Inconsistent Definition Metrics
When there is a lack of clarity on the definitions and interpretations of key performance metrics, there is bound to be confusion. Without a standardized approach to measuring exit criteria for movement across the pipeline, your team will struggle to evaluate progress and set actionable next steps.
3. Lack of Structure
Reviews often end up being either too rushed or spread too thin, focused on too many topics. And unsurprisingly, real issues do not receive the attention they deserve. It’s this lack of structure that gives pipeline reviews a reputation for being primarily about superficial reporting, and not actual planning/insight.
4. No Objective Source of Truth
Without an objective way to evaluate deal health, pipeline reviews can be affected by personal biases, blindspots, or emotional responses. Without a way to objectively capture performance, indicators, and challenges in each stage, you miss a chance to understand what could be slowing your sales reps down.
The right revenue intelligence solution can take the bias out of the discussion by surfacing important insights on deal health and performance.
How is a Sales Pipeline Review Different From an Opportunity Review?
While both involve evaluating sales opportunities, a sales manager’s approach to them has quite a few differences. Here’s a simple way to understand the difference between the two:
Conducting a Sales Pipeline Review: Key Areas of Focus
To develop and run effective sales pipeline reviews, the key is to get all their key elements right.
But before you get into the design of a review, you need to make sure you’ve set the right understanding across the team for each stage.
While the specifics may vary from team to team, the main elements that impact how effective and efficient your pipeline reviews include:
1. Frequency
While the actual frequency of sales pipeline review will depend on the size and stage of your business, the goal is the same: keeping your team accountable while providing support to sustain and improve pipeline health.
Here are some recommendations:
- Early-stage startups, companies with a fast-moving sales process, or a team with new sales reps: Weekly or fortnightly reviews
- Mature companies, or longer sales cycles: A monthly review
2. Attendees
While sales pipeline reviews can be conducted with the whole team or individual sales reps, one-on-one reviews can be much more impactful. They allow your sales reps to truly open up about their challenges and can help change the tone of the meeting from a data collection exercise to a more hands-on one.
3. Agenda
The agenda of the pipeline review meeting sets the tone – and intent – for your conversation. Here’s an example agenda that’s well-structured and optimized for efficiency and focus:
- Pipeline status: An overall snapshot of the pipeline’s status with a clear view of all active deals.
- Stage-wise discussion: Examining each stage, with a focus on top deals in each stage
- High-priority deals: Help identify high-priority deals and what is needed to accelerate their progress.
- A quick review of select metrics
- Summary of challenges and commitment to next steps from both ends (sales rep and manager)
4. Metrics
Questions to Ask in a Sales Pipeline Review
The tone for the pipeline review comes down to the quality of questions you ask as a sales manager.
The key is to aim for a balance between evaluating past performance and planning for downstream success. This means that your questions need to be a combination of reflective, diagnostic, and forward-looking questions.
Here are a few helpful categories of questions to help you pick the right ones for your context:
These questions are about encouraging the sales rep to evaluate their communication quality and pick up on customer cues to improve relationship-building skills.
Revenue intelligence tools like Gong or MeetRecord can help make this discussion more evidence-based. They offer AI-powered insights into customer sentiment, the rep's effectiveness in building relationships, positive indicators, any worrying signs, and potential next steps based on past conversations.
With these questions, you use pipeline reviews to create a culture where sales reps feel comfortable sharing insights and taking ownership of moving things forward. But here’s the thing: encourage them to base their insights not just on their gut, but also back them up with supporting data.
For instance, CRM systems and revenue intelligence software can help them identify exact customer concerns in key stages, and consistently asking these questions to all your sales reps can help you as a sales leader identify patterns and unblock systemic obstacles or momentum breakers.
These questions help you and your sales team understand the broader context of your sales efforts. By exploring what factors might hinder the progression of a deal—or deals similar to it—you help your sales reps recognize patterns that could affect future opportunities.
For instance, understanding why you have a low MQL-to-SQL conversion rate can help improve your lead qualification process, improve the quality of your inbound marketing, or feed into your GTM approach.
These questions will give you much-needed insight into your sales reps’ thought processes and the dynamics at play.
In addition, they will help identify patterns in what resources are consistently required, ultimately streamlining your processes, and informing broader operational, training, or resource allocation decisions within the team.
These questions act to keep pipeline reviews forward-looking while keeping sales reps accountable for their next steps.
These questions act to keep pipeline reviews forward-looking while keeping sales reps accountable for their next steps.
3 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Sales Pipeline Reviews
1. Combining Check-ins and Sales Coaching with Pipeline Reviews
While pipeline reviews shouldn’t exist in isolation, combining them with regular check-ins or sales comes with the risk of diluting their impact.
The goal of pipeline reviews is to focus on deal progression, pipeline health, and key factors that affect them.
The best approach would be to keep these meetings short and targeted – purely on the pipeline, not on coaching or feedback.
The tone of these meetings should be one where the objective focus is on the pipeline health – not on performance.
That being said, insights and talking points from pipeline reviews should feed into your one-on-ones and team meetings.
2. Focusing Only on One Stage of the Pipeline
Only 26% of companies track how leads go from discovery all the way to the closed state. While it’s tempting to focus your energies on deals at the closing stage, doing so can lead to an incomplete understanding of pipeline health.
When you neglect earlier stages, you risk missing out on insights that could impact the downstream stages. Sales managers often jump in during the later stages, assuming that sales reps need their help to close deals. But too often, it might be too late.
A high-level but end-to-end involvement that allows for better qualification, the right positioning, and ultimately, improved likelihood of success in the closing stage.
3. Not Cleaning up Sales Pipelines Regularly
This becomes all the more risky because pipelines dictate the accuracy of sales forecasting – given how most forecasts use the current stage of an opportunity to predict the likelihood of closing.
If you have a later-stage deal that’s gone silent, your sales forecast may still count it as potential revenue – although all the signs may indicate otherwise.
Help your sales reps clean up their pipeline by getting rid of dead or stagnant deals. This is a critical part of ensuring that reviews are accurate and helping reps direct their attention to more productive conversations.
7 Must-Implement Sales Pipeline Review Practices for the Modern Sales Manager
As a sales leader, you have a huge role in ensuring that pipeline reviews are effective and constructive. Here are a few tried and trusted practices that put you on the fastest path to better pipeline review meetings:
1. Make the Pipeline Visual
While this may sound obvious, it’s not as common as you think. As a sales leader, it can be tempting to assume that all your sales reps visualize their pipelines just as you do. But that’s often not the case.
Visualizing the sales pipeline is an easy way to help your sales reps
- Identify where they might be unintentionally focusing too much effort
- Spot trends, and quickly understand which stages need more attention
- Enhance clarity on their overall performance
Leverage the capabilities of your CRM dashboards or AI-powered deal intelligence tools to add this visual aspect to your pipelines and streamline the review process.
2. Stagger Pipeline Reviews with One-on-One Check-ins
A smart cadence involves alternating one-on-one check-ins with one-on-one pipeline reviews.
For example, you could schedule two manager check-ins and two pipeline reviews per month and make team-wide pipeline reviews a quarterly occurrence, This ensures that you have consistent touchpoints for performance updates and strategic coaching for individual sales reps – while leading them towards a big-picture view with the whole team.
3. Consistently Clarify Your Role at Each Stage
Your sales reps need to understand the best use of their time – and yours. As a sales leader, explicitly state what your sales reps can do on their own and what they can expect from you.
In addition to building a sense of empowerment, this clarity can go a long way in building team morale and individual accountability.
4. Minimize Manual Effort or Repetitive Tasks
As a leader, it’s your responsibility to free up your sales reps’ time to focus on selling. This means minimizing manual or repetitive tasks like data entry and automating as much of the pipeline management process as possible.
Make the most of AI and automation to streamline data entry, reporting, and capturing data and insights from every meeting. Instead of expecting your sales rep to spend time gathering pipeline metrics, use a combination of the right tools to do the job – and gather the metrics you need for the review discussions.
5. Align the Narrative Across Stages
Ensure that your sales reps use consistent and on-brand messaging throughout the pipeline. Review the narratives being used at each stage – say through insights from call analysis — and use your sales coaching initiatives to drive consistent messaging across your team.
This strengthens your overall communication strategy and improves the customer experience through clarity and consistency at every touchpoint.
6. Clarify Expectations and Share Data-Based Benchmarks
Use pipeline reviews to reinforce expectations for each stage – for instance, a structured follow-up system for leads, detailing timing, cadence, etc. For example, clear expectations for the prospecting stage could include:
- Inbound leads should be contacted within four hours
- Each lead receives at least X touchpoints in a month
- Include new information or resources with each touchpoint
Additionally, identify benchmarks for each stage of the pipeline and use pipeline reviews to share them with the team.
This could include insights such as the typical duration prospects spend at each stage and the percentage of opportunities that progress, tailored to different customer segments.
This way, you set realistic expectations while also motivating your sales reps to push deals forward.
7. Invest in the right tools
Lastly, the best way for you as a sales manager to optimize the pipeline review process and everything that leads up to it is to invest in the right tools.
Here are some tools that are guaranteed to make your pipeline management much smarter and smoother:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: Tools like HubSpot or Salesforce can help you track every stage of the sales cycle, manage contacts, and visualize pipelines in real time.
- Lead Scoring Tools: Solutions like Marketo and LeadSquared improve your lead qualification efforts, by scoring leads based on fit and engagement.
- Email Tracking Tools: These tools can help you monitor opens, clicks, and responses, helping refine follow-up strategies. Popular tools in this category include Yesware, Mixmax,
- Revenue Intelligence Tools: These include AI-powered platforms that analyze deals and sales conversations—such as calls, emails, and virtual meetings—to extract insights.
They analyze the tone, objections, questions, and competitive mentions to help you assess the likelihood of a deal closing. These include tools like Gong and MeetRecord that provide data-driven insights on deal progress, customer engagement, and deal health.
How MeetRecord’s Revenue Intelligence Improves Your Pipeline Reviews
MeetRecord’s revenue intelligence capabilities are built to help sales managers like you do your best to support your sales reps – at the right time and with complete insight and context.
With MeetRecord, you get real-time evaluations of deal health, and notifications on potential risks and issues. You get targeted alerts for stage changes and prompts to push deals forward – complete with deal recommendations and next steps. The weekly reports feature helps you track deal progression and identify areas needing immediate attention.
The result? You can step in just when your team needs you – without even having to wait for the next pipeline review.
Now, you can enter every sales pipeline review with all the context and insights you need to make it worth its time.
Try MeetRecord to experience what this feels like.
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